The corridor past the broken door ran darker than the hour outside should have allowed. Whatever the Merge had folded into the east wing did not care that the sun still stood over the yard he had left behind.
Nox went in with the wall under his left hand and the gun held low in his right. He kept his steps short and quiet, testing the new speed in his legs against the litter of broken ceiling tile across the floor.
The body answered better than it ever had, quick and certain where it used to drag a half-step late. He let himself trust it a fraction too far and caught a fallen locker with his shin at a bad angle.
The pain arrived exactly as it always had, sharp and honest, entirely unimpressed by his three new points of Endurance. Levels changed what his body could do, then, without turning it into a thing that could not be hurt.
He filed the fact away and kept moving toward the stairwell at the end of the hall. A working map of his own limits was worth more than the comfort of pretending he had none.
The System had handed him a better tool and nothing else, so tools still broke when a person used them wrong.
Sounds carried up the hall from the lower floors, wet and busy, the noise of many mouths at work. He did not let it hurry him, because charging blind into two hundred of them would spend his five rounds faster than any plan could.
The stairwell door stood half open, and the landing beyond it had been turned into a nest. One of the grey things crouched over a torn backpack there, working at the straps as though it expected to find food inside.
Bones and torn cloth littered the landing around it, some of it school uniform, none of it old. The east wing had not stood empty when the Merge sealed it, and the grey things had already been fed once by whoever ran this way first.
It heard him at the door and spun to face him, lower, heavier than it had looked across the classroom. Nox had one second to choose between the gun in his hand and the strength he had just paid ten points to own.
He chose the strength, because bullets were finite and this was the cheapest test he was going to get. He stepped inside its reach and drove a fist into the side of its skull with everything the new points gave him.
The blow turned its head and staggered it a full step sideways along the landing. It also split two knuckles against bone that had no give in it, and the thing recovered a breath before he did.
It came back into him low and raked a claw down his forearm before he dragged the arm clear. The cut burned and ran red to his wrist, teaching the lesson that strength was not the same as knowing how to spend it.
It pressed the advantage and snapped for his face, close enough that he caught the rot on its breath. He got a forearm up and shoved off it, buying the half-step he needed to bring the barrel into play.
He gave up on the clean answer and brought the gun up into the gap between them. The first round punched into its chest and rocked it backward without dropping it, which told him the body ran tougher than a man's.
The second round went lower, into the loose line of the throat where the hide gathered soft. That one found something that mattered, and the creature folded onto the landing to stop moving in stages.
Two floors down, the wet noise paused for a moment, then took up again heavier than before. The gunshots had told something in the building exactly where he stood, and it had decided he was not worth interrupting a meal for.
That patience bothered him more than the noise did, because stupid things did not wait.
A screen opened before the last twitch had finished leaving the creature's legs.
[ Enemy defeated. ]
[ EXP +20. (20 / 100 to Level 2.) ]
Twenty points of EXP for a thing that had nearly opened his forearm to the bone. He held the number in his head and read the climb inside it, one grey body at a time, but a climb that finally led somewhere instead of nowhere.
At twenty a body the math was brutal, though it did not frighten him the way it should. His whole life had been a list of things he could not have, and here was a system selling all of it back for honest work.
He crouched beside the corpse to take what he could from it while the heat was still in it. As his attention settled on the ruined throat, a second prompt unfolded across his sight without asking.
[ Skill unlocked: Appraise. ]
[ Gobdog: Rank F. Weak seam: throat. Core: recoverable, integration locked. ]
The words hung over the body and named the thing he had already bought with two rounds. The throat had been the answer the whole time, and the System only confirmed it once he had paid full price for the lesson.
He read the final line twice, because it offered something and took it back in the same breath. The core was worth having, yet the System would not let him do a single thing with it while it sat in his hand.
The core came free under the point of a pen from the spilled backpack. It sat warm in his palm, a bead of dull glass with nothing to say yet. Even useless, it was the first thing this school had ever let him keep.
He pocketed it and flexed the cut hand to measure what the forearm would cost him going forward. The wound was shallow enough to ignore and deep enough to remember, which fit the rest of the morning well enough.
He tore a strip from the dead student's backpack and wound it tight around the forearm to keep the blood off his grip. It made a poor bandage, but a slick hand missed shots, and he could not spare the rounds a miss would cost.
The stairwell swallowed the last of the outside light within one turn. He counted steps on the way down, keeping a number between himself and the dark.
Down through the tall stairwell window, the world outside had finally noticed the school. Two ambulances and a police cruiser sat at angles across the front drive, their crews out on the grass, moving toward the doors.
He watched them reach the edge of the grounds and stop as though they had walked straight into glass. A faint sheen bent the air along the old fence line, curved and solid, sealing the whole school off from the street.
One officer put his shoulder into the barrier and rebounded off it without leaving so much as a smear. Another fired a round into the sheen and watched it flatten against nothing, then fall spent into the grass.
A fire crew arrived behind the cruisers and set a cutting tool against the barrier, only for the blade to skate off it without a spark. Radios came out and mouths moved, but the wall answered every plan the same way, which was not at all.
The sight settled the last question he had carried since the floor first tore open. No one was coming through that wall today, or on whatever schedule the adults out there still believed in.
The title the school had written across his morning was finally honest, and he was the only person inside it who had stopped waiting to be saved.
A cluster of students had gathered at a ground-floor window near the crews, pounding the glass for help that could not reach them. The people outside spread hands on the barrier and mouthed things nobody inside could use.
He knew none of them from this distance, and it would not have changed his route if he had. Somewhere below sat the one the System had marked as a commander, the single throat worth more than the rest combined.
Nothing yet told him what it looked like, only that a thing clever enough to hold rank would not wait politely at the bottom. Clever things set traps, and a trap was only EXP with a lid on it.
He turned from the window toward the stairs dropping down into the dark of the lower floors. The scan had put the count at 214, and he had just learned in his own blood what each of them would cost.
His forearm throbbed, his knuckles were split, and five rounds remained for a building full of things that took two apiece. None of that changed the direction he was taking, because the only way out ran straight down through the middle of them.